Google Search for "Alphabet" (Photo : Reuters)
Technological issues caused some Google users lack of access to four services of Google on Friday. These were Google Docs, Slides, Drive and Sheet products.
The first incidents of service interruption happened at 11:55 a.m. According to Google, the outage lasted for almost three hours.
Because those cloud products are mainly used by office workers, in affected areas, employees had an early Friday off. Some staff spent it drinking, others watched baseball playoff games or went home early.
These cloud products are free for regular Google users, although the Mountain View-based company generated $1.7 billion from the services in its Q2 revenue, higher by 17 percent compared to 12 months ago. Google earns from these cloud products from big businesses that are paying customers, reports Bloomberg.
In its latest update, Google said that 99.5 percent of affected users had the service restored as of 1:01 PM Pacific and 2:10 PM Pacific for the remaining 0.5 percent. A Google spokesman said, "We are now turning out attention to understanding what caused the outage; our preliminary diagnosis was this was caused by a code push which behaved differently in widespread use than it had during testing," quotes Techcrunch.
The tech giant apologized to affected users. For paying business customers, Google said that it is estimating the impact of the outages and would issue SLA credits.
Some Google users tweeted that their Google drive products are running ridiculously slow and files are not loading, affecting their personal and business accounts.
